I was surfing around and ran across this link, Technorati 100 Here Today Gone Tomorrow, by Tristan Louis. In the piece Louis looks at changes in the Technorati Top 100 Blogs list between 2005 and 2006. There's quite a bit of theorizing about what the change in status for individual blogs indicates or doesn't indicate. In that regard it's somewhat entertaining, but one key point is not addressed... that the Technorati Top 100 Blogs as a measurement tool sucks ass.

I present as exhibit A as to why the Technorati Top 100 Blogs list is worthless, this graphic made last week. [Note: that the rankings of the various blogs shown has since changed.]

Notice the vast difference in the number of links between Seth's Blog and Captain's Quarters. In the age of splogs (spam blogs) and MSN Spaces hacks why would anyone place stock in the number of sites linking to a blog versus the number of unique links? Look at #79 - Join In And Shape The News. Has anyone ever heard of that? I think not. It turns out it's an AOL Journal that is linked on lots of other AOL Journals, though almost never to content, sort of like a splog.

Surely a more meaningful, and accurate, listing of those blogs would be done in the following order:

Captain's Quarters

The Voloch Conspiracy

Poynter Online

Seth's Blog

Join In And Shape The News

Any list that cannot parse these five sites into an that order (or something approximating that order) isn't worth the cyberpaper it's printed on.

The Technorati Top 100 Blogs list is littered with this kind of crap, making it thoroughly useless as a measure of anything. Attempting to divine hidden meanings from the changes in the Technorati rankings is bound to fail as well. It's time to take that list out to the pasture and put it out of it's gamed up misery.

If you're looking for a more worthwhile measure of the top blogs, check out the Feedster Top 500, a monthly snapshot based on links. It's a hell of a lot more representative. TTLB's Ecosystem is also a good measure, but it is far less complete than either Feedster or Technorati. TTLB's EcoTraffic rankings, while incomplete, measure the real statistic that people can wrap their mind around - traffic...

Technorati, for many months now, seems to be absolutely worthless for trying to track anything. My "cosmos" is small enough for me to be able to see pretty much at a glance that links disappear and reappear mysteriously at random, the number of unique links in the "summary" frequently does not match the number of unique links that appear in the listing, and many legitimate links to and from legitimate blogs that are listed with Technorati never seem to show up at all. I'm glad to find out I'm not the only one who can't figure out what they're actually tracking or how they're tracking it.

Technorati is an interesting animal. Relying solely on linking sites or total links can both be problematic. If I had to choose one, I'd go with linking sites since it's likely harder to get thousands of unique sites to link to you than it is to get the same sites to link to you over and over again.

Ideally, the popularity of each linking blog should also be taken into consideration so the weight of a link varies with the credibility of the linking source. Google does this today, but I don't know if Technorati's there yet.